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Why Google Wants to Sell Its Robots: Reality Is Hard

168 points by antman 11y ago

chriskanan 11y ago
I wonder what Google's thinking was when they bought Boston Dynamics if they are now selling them because of the long timeframe. Trying to accelerate the timeframe, helping to make the robots autonomous using their other AI groups, and being ready to launch when the technology is ready are the reasons I thought they made this acquisition.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  They may just have wanted to get a good clear look at the state of their technology and then having done so, decided that it wasn't interesting. They could also be keeping the interesting bits for themselves.
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vermontdevil 11y ago
They also admitted autonomous cars are going to take much longer than anticipated. Up to 30 years. Perhaps the car situation and this are forcing them to rethink some of their plans.
- nharada 11y ago
  I can't find a source for this, where did they say that?
  - itg 11y ago
    http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/google-selfdriving-car-will-be-ready-soon-for-some-in-decades-for-others http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self... What they said is that it may be restricted to certain scenarios initially. A go anywhere self driving car may take longer.
    - ghaff 11y ago
      A lot of people here jump on the robo-taxi idea whenever the topic of autonomous vehicles come up. I think it's fair to say that most of the people deeply familiar with the issues peg that as being decades out. On the other hand, we seem to be very close to very good assistive driving systems and pretty close to (at least the potential to) turn over control to those systems under at least certain types of highway driving. That's actually a very desirable thing given the number of highway accidents caused by driver fatigue and inattentively plowing into the car ahead. It just doesn't lead to all the visions of cars-on-demand etc. that get people all excited.
      - mdorazio 11y ago
        Not so. I work in the industry and most people agree that first-gen robotaxis will hit the streets of LA and SV around 2020. Obviously these locations are ideal for the use case since they have nice weather, flat terrain, and generally decent roads. It will be years later that a robotaxi picks you up on a snowy street in Manhattan, but this is a situation where incremental launches and improvements make sense - some markets are easier than others, so you can launch to those markets where autonomous is good enough.
        ktRolster 11y ago
        As someone who works in the industry, can you explain the good reasons for choosing 2020 as the estimate? (As opposed to this: https://xkcd.com/678/ https://xkcd.com/678/ or just hopeful thinking)
        lrem 11y ago
        As someone who works in a big company, for some reason every long-term plan is touted this-2020 and that-2020. It's just easier to sell as a slogan and may influence real deadlines. That is until probably 2018, when everything will get named those-2025.
        11y ago
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- rayiner 11y ago
  Obviously. People who think general purpose self driving cars are just a few years out ignore the basic tenant of engineering: the last 10% is 90% of the work. And with stuff like supersonic planes or Mars travel, the last 10% may take an indefinite amount of time.
  - robotresearcher 11y ago
    I'm pretty optimistic that supersonic planes are possible.
  - upstairs2 11y ago
    Engineering has tenants? That I did not know.
- mdorazio 11y ago
  That's twisting what they said. Google (and everyone else working on self-driving) is still targeting a 2020 timeframe for autonomous vehicles to be ready for the public [1]. However, the first cars that hit the road will likely be somewhat limited to certain geographies and weather conditions until all the corner cases are figured out and the sensor tech gets a bit better. I think it's more likely that BD's robotics plans just don't mesh with Google's goals since BD is mostly focused on military tech, and Google is not. It just doesn't fit in well with the kinds of things X and the other Alphabet hardware teams are working on. [1] http://www.ibtimes.com/google-inc-says-self-driving-car-will-be-ready-2020-1784150 http://www.ibtimes.com/google-inc-says-self-driving-car-will...
  - azakai 11y ago
    That older link looks outdated based on this newer information. Google admitted now that it will take 5-30 years to achieve the full goals here. Also, that this technology will show up in pieces - cars will become more and more autonomous. And that makes sense, we already have cars from multiple manufacturers that can drive autonomously on highways, for example. The new information Google provided is that the full "no gas pedal, no brake pedal, can drive anywhere" dream of a fully autonomous car will take up to 30 years to arrive.
    - erikpukinskis 11y ago
      > The new information Google provided is that the full "no gas pedal, no brake pedal, can drive anywhere" dream of a fully autonomous car will take up to 30 years to arrive. The thing is, it doesn't really matter what Google thinks. There are six billion people on the planet, and it only takes one governor or president to decide that some local company's autonomous cars are "good enough" to serve as driverless cabs and they decide they want to reap the economic benefit of being a first mover and all of the sudden it's a geopolitical arms race. We're already past the point where autonomous cars can drive many routes more safely than a typical human. That's just a fact of the universe. You can speculate that the entire world's political forces will form a perfect coalition to prevent the removal of steering wheels from those cars for 30 years, but I don't think that's how politics works.
bsbechtel 11y ago
I haven't bought completely into all the AI hype, so take this with a grain of salt, but I feel like on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being human, we are at a 3 or 4. Boston Dynamics is trying to do things at level 8 with tools still stuck at the lower levels of AI. If there is a massive economic opportunity for AI tech that's available now, it's figuring out how to get it out of SV and making it useful for small businesses across the country. There are literally thousands of tasks that can be done faster and better using AI, but the problem is to use AI, you need someone skilled in basic programming to spend a week teaching themselves the basics before they can even begin to think about solving real business problems. Simplifying AI tools to the point where someone with basic excel/web browser skills can learn and apply this tech to their business operations in a few hours' time will be key to unlocking this opportunity.
- pythonlion 11y ago
  I'm curious. Would you explain why we are at 3-4? and using that scale how much more we need for a commercially available autonomous car, and why?
  - bsbechtel 11y ago
    Well a car operates in only two dimensions and has one given goal of transport from point A to B, so a car would maybe be a 5 or a 6. Keep in mind this scale is how close we are to actual human simulation. Humans brains deal with setting their own goals, dealing with conflicting information in pursuit of those goals, making trade offs, a constant influx of new information that affects variables in the decision making process, etc, all of which have yet to be adequately solved by AI. As the article points out, there are lots of mechanical/hardware complexities that further complicate the software with human robotics, and don't forget the average worker has 30-40 years of life experience (i.e. Learning) that a robot would need to somehow replicate. I'm not saying these problems won't eventually be solved, but AI tech has some tools that are really useful right now, but most people don't know how to use them. Instead of trying to skip up the ladder from step 4 to step 8, let's figure out ways to introduce step 4 to more people, and then we'll have more brains trying to solve the problems at steps 5, 6, and 7 to help us get to 8. Everyone will also make more money along the way :-)
argonaut 11y ago
Out of all the reasons I've read in the media, I really only see one legitimate (non-FUD) possible reason for Google selling Boston Dynamics: they didn't integrate into the company well. Not building the products Google envisions, and not working with Google's other robotic divisions, both seem like really glaring issues that would motivate splitting off Boston Dynamics. Google has many divisions working on unprofitable long term research projects, so clearly that's not the reason. I don't think it's fear of humanoid AI - this doesn't seem like something the founders of Google would fear.
- Retric 11y ago
  IMO, Boston Dynamics is working on hard problems that have small mid term value. If your options is 100 billion in R&D or use wheels, the obvious choice 98% of the time is to use wheels. Wheels are quiet, low matence, lower energy, well understood etc. Stairs seem like a big deal but roomba demonstrates if there cheap you can just have another robot upstairs.
- joshmarinacci 11y ago
  This. Another article that was more in depth said that the other robotics companies Google bought were being integrated into other divisions. Boston Dynamics is the only one being sold off. For whatever reasons they didn't mesh well with the rest of Google.
  - sschueller 11y ago
    It is possible that Boston Dynamics is still very tight with military contractors and technologies which may prevent separation. Google made it clear it does not want these contracts and associations. What if a chip/software chunk in Atlas was made by Raytheon and any modification needs to shared back? Or access is not even possible.
    - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
      > Google made it clear it does not want these contracts and associations. They did? Google still does DoD contracts for supplying Google Maps among other things. I figured they didn't care.
mtgx 11y ago
So it's even more far-fetched than a "Moonshoot" project? Will Google even get to keep the technology it created so far, or will it all be sold as IP and they won't be able to re-use any of it for other projects?
- roye 11y ago
  It could be that the standard for moonshots changed with the formation of Alphabet. That's the impression I got from yesterday's press coverage.
roye 11y ago
The mention of groups of robots learning together by exposing themselves to the real world and sharing lessons is very interesting to consider. I wonder if this is inspired by ants searching for food and leaving scent trails. Are there success stories of this approach in robotics already?
johnm1019 11y ago
> "In order to make AI work in the real world and handle all the diversity and complexity of realistic environments, we will need to think about how to get robots to learn continuously and for a long time, perhaps in cooperation with other robots," said Levine. SkyNet is coming.
AndrewKemendo 11y ago
I don't know if is because the author is trying to be accessible, or genuinely doesn't understand AI but the writing eregiously understates the difficulty of human level machines. If I had to summarize what the article said: "Google tried these robots but are selling them because it turns out to be hard to make robots that are as capable as humans." Which is like saying "it turns out that making humans immortal is really hard." I doubt that is why Google is selling BD. My guess is that it was a combination of things: BD was a cost center with no commercialization roadmap, someone on the board got spooked about stupid AI risks, with the alphago wins it might start looking too scary for the public. I think it was a terrible idea for Google, but is great for the robotics world as the behemoth is scaling back totally taking over the world.
- josh2600 11y ago
  I think Google is selling BD (and is putting all of the BD propaganda out) because the BD robots are 1) fairly useless outside of military applications and 2) BD is a ghost town because Andy left and took a lot of the brainpower with him. For Google, selling BD now is probably the last possible time BD will be worth money.
- mappingbabeljc 11y ago
  Hi there, author here -- mostly trying to be accessible. And I think in the tech community it is well understood that robotics is hugely difficult, but it seems like general public pretty much equates progress in software AI with progress in robots, which is clearly not the case. We thought it might be helpful to highlight this to people who aren't hugely technical.
  - AndrewKemendo 11y ago
    Thanks and it makes good sense in that context. That said, I do fundamentally believe that there are some things that the "general public" will never wrap their heads around. Feynman had a great take on this when trying to explain why he can't just describe magnetic forces [1]. I'd be curious to hear your take on that. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjmtJpzoW0o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjmtJpzoW0o
s_kilk 11y ago
"...but full autonomy is far away. Marc Raibert, the founder of Boston Dynamics, said as much in an interview with IEEE Spectrum in February, when he acknowledged that in the videos, a human steered the robot via radio during its outside strolls." This seems kinda sketchy to me. It's possible we'll fall into a Robotics Winter, similar to the AI Winter due to these over-inflated claims of advancement.
- zurn 11y ago
  I looked up the quote: "Raibert said that for the outdoor scenes, a human provides general steering via radio while the robot uses its stereo and LIDAR sensors to adjust to terrain variations. ATLAS also does its own balance and motion control. " This kind of navigation level steering is an easy problem compared to stable walking over rough terrain and recovery from kicks and shoves.
  - s_kilk 11y ago
    Maybe, but the videos (and surrounding media) were presented in a way which implied the robot was autonomous, finding it's own path through the terrain. It may not be intentionally misleading, but still misleading.
    - ktRolster 11y ago
      Compare it to that Watson/Carrie Fischer commercial, where Watson is presented as being able to carry on a conversation. It can't really do that, but that's also misleading.
rileymat2 11y ago
"Google’s decision to try to shed its Boston Dynamics robotics group highlights a fundamental research problem: software is far easier to develop and test than hardware. " This is an interesting statement, because I assumed that it was the software that ran the robots that was hard to get right.
- Umn44 11y ago
  "This is an interesting statement, because I assumed that it was the software that ran the robots that was hard to get right." The problem is real objects have weights and properties that conflict with one another and you have to balance those forces and characteristics against gravity.
JetSpiegel 11y ago
"X is hard" is the new Considered Harmful. The newest thought-terminating cliché.
- ant6n 11y ago
  Not using clichés is hard.
mixmax 11y ago
"To develop robots, you have two options: You can either simulate an environment and robot with software and hope the results are accurate enough that you can load it into a machine and watch it walk." This is much harder than you'd think. Here's a fun story from 15 years ago when a friend of mine tried to do some simple AI: His goal was to have a humanoid shape created is software learn how to walk using simple AI. The idea was that it would obey some basic laws (gravity, the limits of its joints, etc.), do something random, check whether or not it was closer to the goal of walking, tweak its parameters, and iterate. The chosen goal was not to fall over. He set up the program, let it run over the weekend and let it do millions of tries. Hopefully when he came back to the office it would have learned how to walk, or at least stand up without falling. His disappointment was huge when he came into the office: The simulated robot was sitting down with its knees bent, thus having achieved the goal of not falling over.
- swsieber 11y ago
  I don't know if that's the best illustration - it seems like he forgot to include forward motion in his fitness function.
  - oh_sigh 11y ago
    Yes...it's not that hard. There are literally dozens of genetic algorithm simulators available to run in your browser which do exactly that.
    - mixmax 11y ago
      15 years ago it was rather hard....
      - oh_sigh 11y ago
        I mean - not that hard to reason about. And it wasn't rather hard 15 years ago either.
- zxcvvcxz 11y ago
markhadfield 11y ago
Also, just as when BMW bought Landrover, the sold it two years later. Google has learned what they needed to learn from Boston Dynamics, and I assuming had a chance to syphon off any talent they wanted too. Time to move on with the key assets.
- 15thandwhatever 11y ago
  Similar how Google did with Motorola Mobility.
vannevar 11y ago
I think Google simply concluded that BD's hydraulics-based approach was a technological dead end, and that there was little to be gained from trying to retool the existing, highly-specialized team. And once the DoD said they wouldn't use it, there was no customer on the horizon to offset the ongoing cost. So there was no short or long term reason to keep it.
julie1 11y ago
DARPA Robots are full 2.1D autonomous. Cars have far less degrees of liberty and their "environment" is heavily subsidized. Why are drones (3D evolution) and electric train (1.xD evolution) easy to build? Well in the case of drones makers don't care about limiting the movements so rules of feedbacks are easy. In case of train, it is even easier. It is all about the size of the decision tree and the number of input(sensors)/output(effectors) that are coupled you need to control. There probably is a metric to give you the domain of "accessible" low hanging fruits of automation that can be set according to the domain. General purpose automates are at best expensive, at worst a scam (see the mechanical Türk). One way to make bots efficient is to specialize them. Hence the Jacquart mecanic computer that created the industrial revolution of 1830 and set the workers on fights and created the conditions for WWI. I guess no one saw the problem of efficiency still exists even with infinite R&D budget. The problem of robots is by requiring quite a lot of investment for their deployment they set an unfair competition between people being backed up by capital and innovative self made man without capital. That was the reason to be of the Luddites.
elcapitan 11y ago
I could see a market for a Google Hydraulic Robodog that follows me when jogging, fending off and biting aggressive real dogs until I call it with "Ok Google, don't be evil!".
- ktRolster 11y ago
  Yeah, but would there be a market for it when the robots cost as much as a car?
  - elcapitan 11y ago
    Having a self driving car follow me to fend off the dogs doesn't work on my running path though.
- daveguy 11y ago
  Except you would have to scream "OK GOOGLE" at it three or four times before it realized you were speaking. Then it would misinterpret "don't be evil" as "donut, be evil" after which it would kindly grab some donuts for you and then enslave humanity.
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rokhayakebe 11y ago
So Google quits because the problem is too hard? Clearly this is not the reason.
- pekk 11y ago
  Google doesn't deserve this kind of deference. As a corporation, they will abandon a problem if predicted expenditures outweigh predicted returns.
iamcreasy 11y ago
I tweeted Elon Musk asking if he wants to buy Boston Dynamics.
- hnmcs 11y ago
  Watch out guys, we've got a stalking horse over here.
return0 11y ago
I think it's a shrewd logical decision. Google wouldn't sell robots just like they won't sell cars, because licensing the software is more lucrative. Same old MS-IBM story really.
iamleppert 11y ago
From the article: "But Boston Dynamics’s creations were not quite as advanced as people assumed. The main problem the company had solved was getting its machines to move in a realistic manner, said a person familiar with the company’s technology, but full autonomy is far away. Marc Raibert, the founder of Boston Dynamics, said as much in an interview with IEEE Spectrum in February, when he acknowledged that in the videos, a human steered the robot via radio during its outside strolls." So basically what they created was fancy R/C toys, not real autonomous and potentially beneficial robots that could do real work? Creating realistic movement is a hard problem, and the associated electronics and algorithms to move from point A to point B, but it's hardly novel. Maybe this coupled with the fact a few others have mentioned the company was poor at working with other divisions is the reason why they want to sell it?
- icebraining 11y ago
  Have you seen the robots they developed? Reducing it to "moving from point A to B" is misleading, in my opinion, even if technically true. They essentially developed machines that could move in difficult terrains, often where humans themselves couldn't. My favorite is the Sand Flea, a small car which can jump 9 meters (30-feet) into the air: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b4ZZQkcNEo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b4ZZQkcNEo
karmacondon 11y ago
I have a hard time believing that Google sold Boston Dynamics because they didn't want to be associated with military applications or with "evil" AI. Boston Dynamics had deep relationships with the government and clear military applications when Google decided to acquire them. I don't see how the PR situation would have changed between now and then. This seems like a case of a merger/acquisition that just didn't work out. Hopefully it's for the best. The military robots that BD makes have the potential to save a lot of lives and do good, in combat and non-combat situations. Ultimately, Google/Alphabet is an advertising company. Maybe it's better for Boston Dynamics to go their own way. They can still maintain a relationship with Google and other companies to share AI knowledge and technology.
- lrem 11y ago
  > The military robots that BD makes have the potential to save a lot of lives and do good, in combat and non-combat situations. This statement somehow felt more scary than all the terminator jokes...
mchahn 11y ago
> The main problem the company had solved was getting its machines to move in a realistic manner Why? Who cares about the aesthetics? The only thing that matters is if they can get the job done while being safe.
- robotresearcher 11y ago
  If the robots are to work around or with people their movements are important. People are very good at predicting and understanding each other's behaviour, which is useful for safety and coordination. This may be secondary to just getting around but it's a serious consideration and area of research in interactive robots.
  - robotresearcher 11y ago
    Dupe, sorry. Delete timed out.
- robotresearcher 11y ago
  Style of movement is functional as well as aesthetic. If the robots are to work around or with people their movements are important. People are very good at predicting and understanding each other's behaviour, which is useful for safety and coordination. This may be secondary to just getting around but it's a serious consideration and area of research in interactive robots.
foobarbecue 11y ago
Weird title. Should be "Why google decided not to sell robots" rather than "Why google wants to sell its robots."
Animats 11y ago
The comment "the division’s leader, Jonathan Rosenberg, said the company needed 'to have a debate on hydraulics.'" is significant. Google also owns Schaft, which has an all-electric humanoid with water-cooled motors that are heavily overdriven for brief periods using ultracapacitors to get a power boost. Boston Dynamics' robots are hydraulic, using proportional valves controlled by high speed servoloops. This works, but it has lots of disadvantages. The energy efficiency is poor when you don't need full power. There's no energy recovery. The system is bulky for a humanoid. For the pony-sized BigDog, it made sense. Early industrial robots were hydraulic, but that's now rarely seen except in very large robots. Electric motors and their controls have improved enormously in recent years. I was expecting, after the Google acquisition, to see a new humanoid robot about now with Schaft's drive system, Boston Dynamics' balance system, and Google's image understanding system. That was the good outcome. Apparently Boston Dynamics does not play well with others, and that didn't happen. Notice that Google isn't selling Schaft. I hope that they're doing OK. They're people from Tokyo University and from Honda's ASIMO project who felt things were moving too slowly. But they're in Tokyo, and Google may have problems managing remote teams. As for "reality is hard", a good humanoid robot is mechanically at least as complicated as a car. Look how much engineering effort it took to develop good cars. Today, small teams can build a car, but that's because the problem and technology are well understood and you can buy many parts off the shelf. Google has no track record in hardware with moving parts. Their autonomous vehicles have great software, but the hardware is purchased and bolted on. (Really bolted on; they do not bother to integrate the sensors into the vehicle shell, unlike every auto manufacturer that's done self-driving.) They're still using those rotating Velodyne scanners, which are a mechanical system that should have been replaced years ago. Flash LIDARs and MEMS LIDARs exist. Even the Google StreetView cars look clunky, and their backpack StreetView thing needs a redesign from GoPro. I can see the cultural problems between Google, with no track record in mechanical engineering and a very young workforce, and Boston Dynamics, with good mechanical engineers and a 67 year old CEO. On the other hand, Google should not have bought all those robotics companies and expected them to make money Real Soon Now. Look at automatic driving. It's been 11 years since the DARPA Grand Challenge, when we first saw that it could really work. Nobody has a production vehicle on the road yet. It's a long haul with a big payoff. This isn't like the ad business. If anybody from Google is reading this: you still have Schaft. Don't fuck that up. Thank you.

168 points by antman 11y ago

I wonder what Google's thinking was when they bought Boston Dynamics if they are now selling them because of the long timeframe. Trying to accelerate the timeframe, helping to make the robots autonomous using their other AI groups, and being ready to launch when the technology is ready are the reasons I thought they made this acquisition.

maxerickson 11y ago
They may just have wanted to get a good clear look at the state of their technology and then having done so, decided that it wasn't interesting. They could also be keeping the interesting bits for themselves.

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vermontdevil 11y ago

They also admitted autonomous cars are going to take much longer than anticipated. Up to 30 years. Perhaps the car situation and this are forcing them to rethink some of their plans.

nharada 11y ago
I can't find a source for this, where did they say that?
- itg 11y ago
  http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/google-selfdriving-car-will-be-ready-soon-for-some-in-decades-for-others http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self... What they said is that it may be restricted to certain scenarios initially. A go anywhere self driving car may take longer.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    A lot of people here jump on the robo-taxi idea whenever the topic of autonomous vehicles come up. I think it's fair to say that most of the people deeply familiar with the issues peg that as being decades out. On the other hand, we seem to be very close to very good assistive driving systems and pretty close to (at least the potential to) turn over control to those systems under at least certain types of highway driving. That's actually a very desirable thing given the number of highway accidents caused by driver fatigue and inattentively plowing into the car ahead. It just doesn't lead to all the visions of cars-on-demand etc. that get people all excited.
    - mdorazio 11y ago
      Not so. I work in the industry and most people agree that first-gen robotaxis will hit the streets of LA and SV around 2020. Obviously these locations are ideal for the use case since they have nice weather, flat terrain, and generally decent roads. It will be years later that a robotaxi picks you up on a snowy street in Manhattan, but this is a situation where incremental launches and improvements make sense - some markets are easier than others, so you can launch to those markets where autonomous is good enough.
      - ktRolster 11y ago
        As someone who works in the industry, can you explain the good reasons for choosing 2020 as the estimate? (As opposed to this: https://xkcd.com/678/ https://xkcd.com/678/ or just hopeful thinking)
        lrem 11y ago
        As someone who works in a big company, for some reason every long-term plan is touted this-2020 and that-2020. It's just easier to sell as a slogan and may influence real deadlines. That is until probably 2018, when everything will get named those-2025.
        11y ago
- deleted 11y ago
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rayiner 11y ago
Obviously. People who think general purpose self driving cars are just a few years out ignore the basic tenant of engineering: the last 10% is 90% of the work. And with stuff like supersonic planes or Mars travel, the last 10% may take an indefinite amount of time.
- robotresearcher 11y ago
  I'm pretty optimistic that supersonic planes are possible.
- upstairs2 11y ago
  Engineering has tenants? That I did not know.
mdorazio 11y ago
That's twisting what they said. Google (and everyone else working on self-driving) is still targeting a 2020 timeframe for autonomous vehicles to be ready for the public [1]. However, the first cars that hit the road will likely be somewhat limited to certain geographies and weather conditions until all the corner cases are figured out and the sensor tech gets a bit better. I think it's more likely that BD's robotics plans just don't mesh with Google's goals since BD is mostly focused on military tech, and Google is not. It just doesn't fit in well with the kinds of things X and the other Alphabet hardware teams are working on. [1] http://www.ibtimes.com/google-inc-says-self-driving-car-will-be-ready-2020-1784150 http://www.ibtimes.com/google-inc-says-self-driving-car-will...
- azakai 11y ago
  That older link looks outdated based on this newer information. Google admitted now that it will take 5-30 years to achieve the full goals here. Also, that this technology will show up in pieces - cars will become more and more autonomous. And that makes sense, we already have cars from multiple manufacturers that can drive autonomously on highways, for example. The new information Google provided is that the full "no gas pedal, no brake pedal, can drive anywhere" dream of a fully autonomous car will take up to 30 years to arrive.
  - erikpukinskis 11y ago
    > The new information Google provided is that the full "no gas pedal, no brake pedal, can drive anywhere" dream of a fully autonomous car will take up to 30 years to arrive. The thing is, it doesn't really matter what Google thinks. There are six billion people on the planet, and it only takes one governor or president to decide that some local company's autonomous cars are "good enough" to serve as driverless cabs and they decide they want to reap the economic benefit of being a first mover and all of the sudden it's a geopolitical arms race. We're already past the point where autonomous cars can drive many routes more safely than a typical human. That's just a fact of the universe. You can speculate that the entire world's political forces will form a perfect coalition to prevent the removal of steering wheels from those cars for 30 years, but I don't think that's how politics works.

bsbechtel 11y ago

I haven't bought completely into all the AI hype, so take this with a grain of salt, but I feel like on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being human, we are at a 3 or 4. Boston Dynamics is trying to do things at level 8 with tools still stuck at the lower levels of AI. If there is a massive economic opportunity for AI tech that's available now, it's figuring out how to get it out of SV and making it useful for small businesses across the country. There are literally thousands of tasks that can be done faster and better using AI, but the problem is to use AI, you need someone skilled in basic programming to spend a week teaching themselves the basics before they can even begin to think about solving real business problems. Simplifying AI tools to the point where someone with basic excel/web browser skills can learn and apply this tech to their business operations in a few hours' time will be key to unlocking this opportunity.

pythonlion 11y ago
I'm curious. Would you explain why we are at 3-4? and using that scale how much more we need for a commercially available autonomous car, and why?
- bsbechtel 11y ago
  Well a car operates in only two dimensions and has one given goal of transport from point A to B, so a car would maybe be a 5 or a 6. Keep in mind this scale is how close we are to actual human simulation. Humans brains deal with setting their own goals, dealing with conflicting information in pursuit of those goals, making trade offs, a constant influx of new information that affects variables in the decision making process, etc, all of which have yet to be adequately solved by AI. As the article points out, there are lots of mechanical/hardware complexities that further complicate the software with human robotics, and don't forget the average worker has 30-40 years of life experience (i.e. Learning) that a robot would need to somehow replicate. I'm not saying these problems won't eventually be solved, but AI tech has some tools that are really useful right now, but most people don't know how to use them. Instead of trying to skip up the ladder from step 4 to step 8, let's figure out ways to introduce step 4 to more people, and then we'll have more brains trying to solve the problems at steps 5, 6, and 7 to help us get to 8. Everyone will also make more money along the way :-)

argonaut 11y ago

Out of all the reasons I've read in the media, I really only see one legitimate (non-FUD) possible reason for Google selling Boston Dynamics: they didn't integrate into the company well. Not building the products Google envisions, and not working with Google's other robotic divisions, both seem like really glaring issues that would motivate splitting off Boston Dynamics. Google has many divisions working on unprofitable long term research projects, so clearly that's not the reason. I don't think it's fear of humanoid AI - this doesn't seem like something the founders of Google would fear.

Retric 11y ago
IMO, Boston Dynamics is working on hard problems that have small mid term value. If your options is 100 billion in R&D or use wheels, the obvious choice 98% of the time is to use wheels. Wheels are quiet, low matence, lower energy, well understood etc. Stairs seem like a big deal but roomba demonstrates if there cheap you can just have another robot upstairs.
joshmarinacci 11y ago
This. Another article that was more in depth said that the other robotics companies Google bought were being integrated into other divisions. Boston Dynamics is the only one being sold off. For whatever reasons they didn't mesh well with the rest of Google.
- sschueller 11y ago
  It is possible that Boston Dynamics is still very tight with military contractors and technologies which may prevent separation. Google made it clear it does not want these contracts and associations. What if a chip/software chunk in Atlas was made by Raytheon and any modification needs to shared back? Or access is not even possible.
  - BinaryIdiot 11y ago
    > Google made it clear it does not want these contracts and associations. They did? Google still does DoD contracts for supplying Google Maps among other things. I figured they didn't care.

mtgx 11y ago

So it's even more far-fetched than a "Moonshoot" project? Will Google even get to keep the technology it created so far, or will it all be sold as IP and they won't be able to re-use any of it for other projects?

roye 11y ago
It could be that the standard for moonshots changed with the formation of Alphabet. That's the impression I got from yesterday's press coverage.

roye 11y ago

The mention of groups of robots learning together by exposing themselves to the real world and sharing lessons is very interesting to consider. I wonder if this is inspired by ants searching for food and leaving scent trails. Are there success stories of this approach in robotics already?

johnm1019 11y ago

> "In order to make AI work in the real world and handle all the diversity and complexity of realistic environments, we will need to think about how to get robots to learn continuously and for a long time, perhaps in cooperation with other robots," said Levine. SkyNet is coming.

AndrewKemendo 11y ago

I don't know if is because the author is trying to be accessible, or genuinely doesn't understand AI but the writing eregiously understates the difficulty of human level machines. If I had to summarize what the article said: "Google tried these robots but are selling them because it turns out to be hard to make robots that are as capable as humans." Which is like saying "it turns out that making humans immortal is really hard." I doubt that is why Google is selling BD. My guess is that it was a combination of things: BD was a cost center with no commercialization roadmap, someone on the board got spooked about stupid AI risks, with the alphago wins it might start looking too scary for the public. I think it was a terrible idea for Google, but is great for the robotics world as the behemoth is scaling back totally taking over the world.

josh2600 11y ago
I think Google is selling BD (and is putting all of the BD propaganda out) because the BD robots are 1) fairly useless outside of military applications and 2) BD is a ghost town because Andy left and took a lot of the brainpower with him. For Google, selling BD now is probably the last possible time BD will be worth money.
mappingbabeljc 11y ago
Hi there, author here -- mostly trying to be accessible. And I think in the tech community it is well understood that robotics is hugely difficult, but it seems like general public pretty much equates progress in software AI with progress in robots, which is clearly not the case. We thought it might be helpful to highlight this to people who aren't hugely technical.
- AndrewKemendo 11y ago
  Thanks and it makes good sense in that context. That said, I do fundamentally believe that there are some things that the "general public" will never wrap their heads around. Feynman had a great take on this when trying to explain why he can't just describe magnetic forces [1]. I'd be curious to hear your take on that. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjmtJpzoW0o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjmtJpzoW0o

s_kilk 11y ago

"...but full autonomy is far away. Marc Raibert, the founder of Boston Dynamics, said as much in an interview with IEEE Spectrum in February, when he acknowledged that in the videos, a human steered the robot via radio during its outside strolls." This seems kinda sketchy to me. It's possible we'll fall into a Robotics Winter, similar to the AI Winter due to these over-inflated claims of advancement.

zurn 11y ago
I looked up the quote: "Raibert said that for the outdoor scenes, a human provides general steering via radio while the robot uses its stereo and LIDAR sensors to adjust to terrain variations. ATLAS also does its own balance and motion control. " This kind of navigation level steering is an easy problem compared to stable walking over rough terrain and recovery from kicks and shoves.
- s_kilk 11y ago
  Maybe, but the videos (and surrounding media) were presented in a way which implied the robot was autonomous, finding it's own path through the terrain. It may not be intentionally misleading, but still misleading.
  - ktRolster 11y ago
    Compare it to that Watson/Carrie Fischer commercial, where Watson is presented as being able to carry on a conversation. It can't really do that, but that's also misleading.

rileymat2 11y ago

"Google’s decision to try to shed its Boston Dynamics robotics group highlights a fundamental research problem: software is far easier to develop and test than hardware. " This is an interesting statement, because I assumed that it was the software that ran the robots that was hard to get right.

Umn44 11y ago
"This is an interesting statement, because I assumed that it was the software that ran the robots that was hard to get right." The problem is real objects have weights and properties that conflict with one another and you have to balance those forces and characteristics against gravity.

JetSpiegel 11y ago

"X is hard" is the new Considered Harmful. The newest thought-terminating cliché.

ant6n 11y ago
Not using clichés is hard.

mixmax 11y ago

"To develop robots, you have two options: You can either simulate an environment and robot with software and hope the results are accurate enough that you can load it into a machine and watch it walk." This is much harder than you'd think. Here's a fun story from 15 years ago when a friend of mine tried to do some simple AI: His goal was to have a humanoid shape created is software learn how to walk using simple AI. The idea was that it would obey some basic laws (gravity, the limits of its joints, etc.), do something random, check whether or not it was closer to the goal of walking, tweak its parameters, and iterate. The chosen goal was not to fall over. He set up the program, let it run over the weekend and let it do millions of tries. Hopefully when he came back to the office it would have learned how to walk, or at least stand up without falling. His disappointment was huge when he came into the office: The simulated robot was sitting down with its knees bent, thus having achieved the goal of not falling over.

swsieber 11y ago
I don't know if that's the best illustration - it seems like he forgot to include forward motion in his fitness function.
- oh_sigh 11y ago
  Yes...it's not that hard. There are literally dozens of genetic algorithm simulators available to run in your browser which do exactly that.
  - mixmax 11y ago
    15 years ago it was rather hard....
    - oh_sigh 11y ago
      I mean - not that hard to reason about. And it wasn't rather hard 15 years ago either.
zxcvvcxz 11y ago

markhadfield 11y ago

Also, just as when BMW bought Landrover, the sold it two years later. Google has learned what they needed to learn from Boston Dynamics, and I assuming had a chance to syphon off any talent they wanted too. Time to move on with the key assets.

15thandwhatever 11y ago
Similar how Google did with Motorola Mobility.

vannevar 11y ago

I think Google simply concluded that BD's hydraulics-based approach was a technological dead end, and that there was little to be gained from trying to retool the existing, highly-specialized team. And once the DoD said they wouldn't use it, there was no customer on the horizon to offset the ongoing cost. So there was no short or long term reason to keep it.

julie1 11y ago

DARPA Robots are full 2.1D autonomous. Cars have far less degrees of liberty and their "environment" is heavily subsidized. Why are drones (3D evolution) and electric train (1.xD evolution) easy to build? Well in the case of drones makers don't care about limiting the movements so rules of feedbacks are easy. In case of train, it is even easier. It is all about the size of the decision tree and the number of input(sensors)/output(effectors) that are coupled you need to control. There probably is a metric to give you the domain of "accessible" low hanging fruits of automation that can be set according to the domain. General purpose automates are at best expensive, at worst a scam (see the mechanical Türk). One way to make bots efficient is to specialize them. Hence the Jacquart mecanic computer that created the industrial revolution of 1830 and set the workers on fights and created the conditions for WWI. I guess no one saw the problem of efficiency still exists even with infinite R&D budget. The problem of robots is by requiring quite a lot of investment for their deployment they set an unfair competition between people being backed up by capital and innovative self made man without capital. That was the reason to be of the Luddites.

elcapitan 11y ago

I could see a market for a Google Hydraulic Robodog that follows me when jogging, fending off and biting aggressive real dogs until I call it with "Ok Google, don't be evil!".

ktRolster 11y ago
Yeah, but would there be a market for it when the robots cost as much as a car?
- elcapitan 11y ago
  Having a self driving car follow me to fend off the dogs doesn't work on my running path though.
daveguy 11y ago
Except you would have to scream "OK GOOGLE" at it three or four times before it realized you were speaking. Then it would misinterpret "don't be evil" as "donut, be evil" after which it would kindly grab some donuts for you and then enslave humanity.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

rokhayakebe 11y ago

So Google quits because the problem is too hard? Clearly this is not the reason.

pekk 11y ago
Google doesn't deserve this kind of deference. As a corporation, they will abandon a problem if predicted expenditures outweigh predicted returns.

iamcreasy 11y ago

I tweeted Elon Musk asking if he wants to buy Boston Dynamics.

hnmcs 11y ago
Watch out guys, we've got a stalking horse over here.

return0 11y ago

I think it's a shrewd logical decision. Google wouldn't sell robots just like they won't sell cars, because licensing the software is more lucrative. Same old MS-IBM story really.

iamleppert 11y ago

From the article: "But Boston Dynamics’s creations were not quite as advanced as people assumed. The main problem the company had solved was getting its machines to move in a realistic manner, said a person familiar with the company’s technology, but full autonomy is far away. Marc Raibert, the founder of Boston Dynamics, said as much in an interview with IEEE Spectrum in February, when he acknowledged that in the videos, a human steered the robot via radio during its outside strolls." So basically what they created was fancy R/C toys, not real autonomous and potentially beneficial robots that could do real work? Creating realistic movement is a hard problem, and the associated electronics and algorithms to move from point A to point B, but it's hardly novel. Maybe this coupled with the fact a few others have mentioned the company was poor at working with other divisions is the reason why they want to sell it?

icebraining 11y ago
Have you seen the robots they developed? Reducing it to "moving from point A to B" is misleading, in my opinion, even if technically true. They essentially developed machines that could move in difficult terrains, often where humans themselves couldn't. My favorite is the Sand Flea, a small car which can jump 9 meters (30-feet) into the air: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b4ZZQkcNEo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b4ZZQkcNEo

karmacondon 11y ago

I have a hard time believing that Google sold Boston Dynamics because they didn't want to be associated with military applications or with "evil" AI. Boston Dynamics had deep relationships with the government and clear military applications when Google decided to acquire them. I don't see how the PR situation would have changed between now and then. This seems like a case of a merger/acquisition that just didn't work out. Hopefully it's for the best. The military robots that BD makes have the potential to save a lot of lives and do good, in combat and non-combat situations. Ultimately, Google/Alphabet is an advertising company. Maybe it's better for Boston Dynamics to go their own way. They can still maintain a relationship with Google and other companies to share AI knowledge and technology.

lrem 11y ago
> The military robots that BD makes have the potential to save a lot of lives and do good, in combat and non-combat situations. This statement somehow felt more scary than all the terminator jokes...

mchahn 11y ago

> The main problem the company had solved was getting its machines to move in a realistic manner Why? Who cares about the aesthetics? The only thing that matters is if they can get the job done while being safe.

robotresearcher 11y ago
If the robots are to work around or with people their movements are important. People are very good at predicting and understanding each other's behaviour, which is useful for safety and coordination. This may be secondary to just getting around but it's a serious consideration and area of research in interactive robots.
- robotresearcher 11y ago
  Dupe, sorry. Delete timed out.
robotresearcher 11y ago
Style of movement is functional as well as aesthetic. If the robots are to work around or with people their movements are important. People are very good at predicting and understanding each other's behaviour, which is useful for safety and coordination. This may be secondary to just getting around but it's a serious consideration and area of research in interactive robots.

foobarbecue 11y ago

Weird title. Should be "Why google decided not to sell robots" rather than "Why google wants to sell its robots."

Animats 11y ago

The comment "the division’s leader, Jonathan Rosenberg, said the company needed 'to have a debate on hydraulics.'" is significant. Google also owns Schaft, which has an all-electric humanoid with water-cooled motors that are heavily overdriven for brief periods using ultracapacitors to get a power boost. Boston Dynamics' robots are hydraulic, using proportional valves controlled by high speed servoloops. This works, but it has lots of disadvantages. The energy efficiency is poor when you don't need full power. There's no energy recovery. The system is bulky for a humanoid. For the pony-sized BigDog, it made sense. Early industrial robots were hydraulic, but that's now rarely seen except in very large robots. Electric motors and their controls have improved enormously in recent years. I was expecting, after the Google acquisition, to see a new humanoid robot about now with Schaft's drive system, Boston Dynamics' balance system, and Google's image understanding system. That was the good outcome. Apparently Boston Dynamics does not play well with others, and that didn't happen. Notice that Google isn't selling Schaft. I hope that they're doing OK. They're people from Tokyo University and from Honda's ASIMO project who felt things were moving too slowly. But they're in Tokyo, and Google may have problems managing remote teams. As for "reality is hard", a good humanoid robot is mechanically at least as complicated as a car. Look how much engineering effort it took to develop good cars. Today, small teams can build a car, but that's because the problem and technology are well understood and you can buy many parts off the shelf. Google has no track record in hardware with moving parts. Their autonomous vehicles have great software, but the hardware is purchased and bolted on. (Really bolted on; they do not bother to integrate the sensors into the vehicle shell, unlike every auto manufacturer that's done self-driving.) They're still using those rotating Velodyne scanners, which are a mechanical system that should have been replaced years ago. Flash LIDARs and MEMS LIDARs exist. Even the Google StreetView cars look clunky, and their backpack StreetView thing needs a redesign from GoPro. I can see the cultural problems between Google, with no track record in mechanical engineering and a very young workforce, and Boston Dynamics, with good mechanical engineers and a 67 year old CEO. On the other hand, Google should not have bought all those robotics companies and expected them to make money Real Soon Now. Look at automatic driving. It's been 11 years since the DARPA Grand Challenge, when we first saw that it could really work. Nobody has a production vehicle on the road yet. It's a long haul with a big payoff. This isn't like the ad business. If anybody from Google is reading this: you still have Schaft. Don't fuck that up. Thank you.